Word: rayburnisms
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...Credits. Still, with the long Labor Day weekend ahead and L.BJ.'s agents all around, the conferees showed no new signs of agreement. The President was not about to give up. "Mr. Rayburn always used to say that there comes a time for every leader when he must shove in his whole stack," mused Lyndon. "Well, I've shoved my whole stack...
HIGHLAND PARK, ILL., Tenthouse Theater: Margaret Whiting and Gene Rayburn on the Gypsy caravan...
...version, President Johnson maintained that he had truly been wanted. Kennedy, said L.B.J., "asked me on his own motion to go on the ticket with him, and I gave him my reasons for hesitating." Johnson's old friend and congressional patron, the late House Speaker "Mr. Sam" Rayburn, was initially dead set against L.B.J.'s joining the Kennedy ticket; so was virtually everyone else in Johnson's camp. But Kennedy, President Johnson declared at his news conference, "told me he would speak to Speaker Rayburn and others and he did. And subsequently he called me and said...
...Johnson friend, Texan Homer Thornberry, and by a former Mississippi Governor (1956-60), James P. Coleman. Thornberry, a federal district judge in Austin since 1963, succeeded Johnson in the House of Representatives in 1948 when Lyndon was elected a Senator. In the House, he was a Johnson-Rayburn-type moderate. Coleman is a segregationist-but far from a rabid redneck. He was a supporter of John Kennedy, lost a 1963 attempt to return to the governorship after his opponents labeled him "a weak sister trying to find the middle ground on segregation." Thornberry will replace retired Judge Joseph C. Hutcheson...
Interestingly, Rayburn emerges from these reminiscences as a good tabulator of votes, but a fairly ineffective leader. On the fight to make the Rules Committee more responsive to the leadership, for example, Rayburn declined the best method for seemingly insubstantial reasons. A purge of Colmer from the Rules Committee for not supporting the party ticket in 1960 could have been quite easily accomplished in party caucus. Rayburn chose instead to enlarge the Committee, a move which required vote of the full House--including Republicans--and therefore brought on a long, bitter fight, apparently because of sentiment (purges aren't nice...